A Passionate Man (21 page)

Thomas thought St Stephen's Church in Rochester Row was horrible. It was a sad, dead colour and everything about it seemed too tall and sharp and most unfriendly. The street was horrible, too, grim and red, like a menacing great passage. Why on earth his grandfather's funeral had to happen in such an awful place was incomprehensible.

It was frightening being so few of them, just him and Archie and Liza and Marina one side and a few old men in dark suits the other. Archie had said there would be a huge memorial service later, which would be very cheerful because it would be all about the marvellous things Grandpa had done, but Thomas might not be able to come to that, because of school. He wished he hadn't come to this. He'd said yes partly to please Archie and partly to spite Mikey, and he regretted both of those reasons now, sitting between Liza and Marina in the gloomy dark with the almost unbearable sight of Grandpa's coffin there, in front of them, on a chrome trolley with rubber wheels. The trolley and the wheels offended Thomas the way his grandfather's bare feet had done.

He thought it unlikely he would cry any more. He thought he must have cried himself right out. He was sick of crying. The only thing to do was not to think about Grandpa, and not to think about going back to school, either – the other black beast that lurked about waiting for his mind to lie idle for a second. He seized his prayer book. He would count all the ‘e's on one page. Liza's hand came down and turned the pages back to the correct place and ran a pointing finger along the current line of prayer. Thomas waited until she had taken her hand away and then he closed the prayer book with enormous carefulness and put it in front of him, on the polished wooden ledge. He would have nothing to do with it.

The undertaker's men came up the aisle. There were six of them. They were not all the same size and they were not pleasing to look at. Slight quivering beside him told Thomas that Liza had begun to cry. He leaned forward imperceptibly, and out of the side of his eyes saw that his father's eyes were full of spilling tears that he was doing nothing about, just letting them brim and fall. It was terrible. The undertaker's men undid some little bolts, lifted the coffin on to their shoulders and made a wide sweep in front of the brass rods of the rood screen; then Thomas realized that they were going to walk away down the aisle. Carrying Grandpa. They were carrying the coffin away. Where? To do what . . . ? A vast black mushroom ballooned up inside Thomas's head and shoved at his skull and his tongue and the backs of his eyes.

Marina's hand appeared. It took his, very hard. Then her face followed it.

‘Look up there,' Marina said. ‘Go on. Look up.'

Her other hand was pointing.

‘Where?' Thomas said, battling with the mushroom.

‘Up there. Look up there.'

Above the choir stalls, Thomas could dimly see a faraway roof. It looked blue. It glimmered.

‘Stars,' Marina said. ‘Just look at that. Hundreds and hundreds of golden stars.'

January had laid its repressive hand on Stoke Stratton. It had not sent snow, but frost; frost and pearl-grey skies to brood over dark trees and dun grass. In the garden at Beeches House, only a brave eleagnus had any colour. If people had to die, Liza thought miserably, why did they do it at a time of year that seemed quite to have lost hope? She knelt on the floor of Thomas's bedroom, in front of his school trunk, with the Pinemount uniform list on the floor beside her, and a pencil to tick off the endless columns of socks and shirts and soccer boots. Thomas, who was supposed to be helping, was slumped on the sofa downstairs in front of a video of
Superman
. She had neither the heart nor the energy to rout him out. They were all worn out with each other, tired of death. Pinemount might at least be a change for Thomas, a place where death and all its ramifying complications were swiftly swamped by timetables and sport.

She put her face down into the trunk. It smelled poignantly of detergent and boy. She, too, longed for term to begin, partly because she so much needed a structure once more, and partly because she wanted Blaise O'Hanlon's admiration back, an admiration that she had, magnificent in her sternness, told him he must desist from, when he had telephoned from Dublin two days before Christmas. She wanted it, she told herself, because living with Archie was so lonely just now; lonely and complicated. It was complicated because he could fill her with frustrated fury, as he did the night Colin Jenkins came, and then, as at the funeral, with real pity: he had turned to her, in that beastly church, and put his arm round her and drawn her to him, and that, for all its sweetness, was more confusing than anything.

She straightened up. She must not think about it. She must think about marked hairbrushes and spare name tapes and towels with loops on them, for swimming. On Thomas's bed, above the opened trunk lid, Blue Rabbit lay propped against the pillow and watched her lugubriously out of his brown embroidered eyes. Perhaps, Liza thought, picking up the list once more, perhaps now that Andrew was dead, the idea of Pinemount might die, too? But she would have to talk to Archie, and at the moment how could anyone, anywhere, talk to Archie?

‘Old rubbish,' Granny Mossop muttered.

She lay on her side in a high hard bed in the geriatric ward and mumbled her lips about. She was so thin now that her bed had had to be padded up for her, and, because of the constant accidents of her condition, she was padded, too, a bundle of alien white hospital swaddlings out of which her little brown hands and arms crept like twigs.

‘You are not old rubbish,' Archie said. He sat on a chair by her bed and leaned so he could see her. ‘You are not here because you are rubbish, but because you couldn't manage at home any more.'

‘Could,' she said.

Her teeth floated upside down in a jar of pink fluid on the bedside trolley. Without them, her mouth sucked and fluttered, collapsing in on itself. Archie put a hand on hers.

‘Sharon was worried—'

‘Ha!'

He dared not ask if Sharon had been in to see her mother. Granny Mossop twitched her hand free. She gestured feebly at the ward.

‘Old fools.'

She was difficult to hear. He bent closer. She smelled of cloth and age and illness. They were afraid jaundice was setting in. She would smell worse then.

‘I'll be back,' Archie said. ‘I'll be back in a few days.'

‘Ha,' she said again, with less emphasis.

‘I will. I promise you.'

He did not want to leave her. He stood up and waited for a moment, looking down on her wasted, nut-like face and uneven tussocks of white hair. I am afraid, he thought, I am afraid that if I leave her she will die, and if I am not here when she dies, then I will never know.

He went down the polished corridors of the hospital, past screens and pairs of double doors and a mystifying complexity of green signs sending the scarcely hopeful sick down the labyrinths to a chance of cure. A good many of the staff knew him because he was a faithful visitor of practice patients, and some of them stopped him and said how sorry, how very sorry they were about Sir Andrew and how much he would be missed. Thank you, he said, yes, how nice of you; no, we had the funeral quickly because it was what he wished, and there will be a memorial service later.

‘It's harder, if you're a doctor,' a staff nurse he had known for years said to him. ‘People don't think that. They think that because you know, you understand and so it's easier. But it's the reverse really, isn't it? It's knowing why that makes accepting so hard.'

‘And unfinished business,' Archie said.

He went out to find his car. He had no desire to get into it and less to drive back to the health centre. He unlocked the door, and climbed into the driver's seat and sat for a while looking at, but not seeing, a brisk, inflexible shrub planted against an unlovely brick wall. Thomas would be getting to Pinemount now, driven by Liza with Diana Jago, whose spirits could be relied upon to remain buoyant and infectious. Was second term better than first? Or was it worse because there were no optimistic apprehensions left, you only knew the worst? He started the car. What was worst or best any more? Where was there anything but plateau? ‘I remember thinking one morning,' a woman patient afflicted with profound menopausal depression had once said to Archie, ‘I thought: Is this all there is?' He turned the car into the traffic. God, Archie thought. Is it?

Chapter Eleven

The distinguishing feature of spring terms at Bradley Hall School was that the temperature outside the building felt considerably higher than that inside. The boiler thundered dully away in its basement, pouring heat into the brick walls that surrounded it and only managing to send a tepid trickle through the immense old toast-rack radiators that stood so optimistically under every window. The first day of term was usually spent twisting old newspapers into sausages that could be crammed into the frames of the huge, beautiful eighteenth-century windows that now shook in the winter winds like loose teeth.

The first assembly was always rather festive, chiefly because June Hampole was so genuinely pleased to see the children back. Beaming at them over an enveloping muffler, she told them that the school cat had seven kittens – two toms, she said, and three queens, and two that seemed, however hard she peered, quite androgynous – and that the forsythia was bravely out in the central courtyard and that everyone was to wear gloves for lessons until they were told they might take them off.

‘The children cannot write in gloves,' Mrs West called clearly.

‘All the better. They are at the most receptive age for learning by heart.'

Liza, laughing, allowed Blaise to catch her eye. He looked older, a little thinner, and his air of dishevelled bohemian glamour was even more pronounced. He had said nothing to her yet, merely looked. Liza was wearing the green jersey Marina had given her.

‘You must all sit very close to one another,' June Hampole said. ‘But there is to be no touching. No silly touching, that is. And we will pause every ten minutes or so, and do a minute's jumping.'

Mrs West, a professional of forty years' experience, winced faintly. Her English classes would proceed in the orthodox manner they always did. She had brought an electric fan heater with her. Jumping would not even be considered. Liza, happy for the first day in weeks, wanted to laugh out loud at the thought of jumping. Her classes could jump to their verbs. The whole assembly was laughing.

‘No laughing!' Commander Haythorne barked.

June Hampole, thoughtfully chewing the earpiece of her spectacles, said they would have a closing prayer. She had not looked one out; she merely thought she would invent one on the spot.

‘Dear Father,' she said musingly, and paused, ‘Dear Father.' The children, heads bowed, waited. ‘Dear Father, this term is like the year, a new page. Which we are going to write on. With great kindness to one another and no fibs and no bullying. Our pens,' said June Hampole gathering speed, ‘shall be our loving hearts as well as our desire to do well and to make our parents proud of us. And . . .' she paused again. ‘And. And Amen, I think.'

‘Amen,' the children chorused loudly.

In the crowd pushing out of the chapel, Liza waited for Blaise's voice at her shoulder. She did not hear it. She was carried out into the hall and surrounded by children wishing to tell her about Christmas presents and skiing holidays and how they thought they had a sort of pain. Across their heads, she saw Blaise herding his first football lesson down the dark passage that led to the fearsome and beetle-infested changing rooms. He did not glance at her. He had not, of course, Liza told herself, noticed she was there.

She turned sternly upon her first classful and said, ‘Now that's quite enough attempts to deflect me. In you go. And we'll get the jumping over at the beginning.'

She did not see Blaise at break. She sat beside Commander Haythorne on the accommodating leather sofa in the staff room and he offered her a ginger biscuit out of his particular tin, and told her about his Christmas in Wales, and Liza was a very animated listener in case Blaise should come in and think for one instant that she was waiting for him. He did not come in. She ate her biscuit and Commander Haythorne described the majesty of the seas at Marlow Sands in winter and the atrociousness of his daughter-in-law's housekeeping skills, and her high delight in the day dimmed a little and admitted itself to be troubled.

The morning wore on, and lunchtime came, an Outward Bound exercise in the orangery where the frost still iced the glass inside, and steam rose from the mounds of potatoes and cabbage in exaggerated clouds. Liza seated herself at the head of her usual table and after a while Blaise came in with a troop of boys, and passed her, saying, ‘It's murderous out there. The ground's like iron. Am I liable if they break their little legs?'

His voice was easy and conversational. It was the voice he used for everybody. He then stopped by Mrs West and said something quite prolonged to her and made her laugh. Liza turned brightly to the child beside her, a plain and eager girl of eleven who never seemed aware that her determination to sit next to members of staff at meals did not endear her to her contemporaries.

‘Well, Laura. Was Christmas all it should be?'

‘Mrs Logan, it was brilliant. Granny came and so did my other grandfather and we went carol singing and Mummy didn't have a headache, not once, and I had champagne and the dog was sick but not on Granny, luckily, and on Boxing Day—'

But he looked at me in prayers, Liza thought. It wasn't an ordinary look, either. He's just being careful, he's not arousing suspicion. I must play the same game, of course I must.